Why Doesn’t Anyone on the Enterprise Wear Gloves? and other Star Trek conundrums

I’m currently watching Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first time (just started season 6). I know, I know – how did a nerd like me miss the boat? Part of it was the fact that I was born the same year the series started, so you’ll have to excuse my past baby self for not tuning in. I’m also the only person in my family who likes sci-fi, so I wasn’t exposed to it there. But frankly, I avoided Star Trek for a long time because I thought it was the world of asocial uber-nerds who liked to blow up stuff with phasers and fabricate technobabble to pretend to be scientific.

Boy, was I wrong. First of all, the science on the show is fantastic overall. There are so many moments where I find myself thinking as a biologist, “Hey, yeah, that’s completely plausible!” You can imagine my glee when it was revealed that a Klingon spy was managing to sneak messages past the transporter’s filters by encoding them as amino acid sequences.

I also can’t stop thinking how damn progressive the show is, especially when I remember it was made over two decades ago. I had no idea that an integral part of every episode is discussing ethics, humanism, and social justice. Or that half the scenes would be in meetings, trials, or diplomacy. To me, one of the most striking example of the show’s progressive values is the relationship between Will Riker and Deanna Troi. I swear they have the most supportive, healthy fuckbuddy relationship that I’ve ever seen on television.

But of course, there are some things in the show that bug me. I think this is inevitable when dealing with speculative sci-fi, since there are always some consequences of technology that writers don’t immediately thing about. Thankfully nitpicking these conundrums seems to be an essential part of being a Star Trek fan, so I have to get these off my chest:

Why doesn’t anyone on the Enterprise wear gloves? If this has a simple explanation like “the ship generates an invisible glove force field when required,” please tell me. Because right now, every time Dr. Crusher touches a patient with some horrible alien disease, or Geordi handles some hazardous substance in the cargo bay, or someone touches a piece of evidence with bare hands, the scientist in me dies a little.

Why does everyone conveniently ignore the curative power of the transporter? When Dr. Pulaski is rapidly aged by an antibody that alters her DNA, the crew uses her old genome sequence as a filter in the transporter to transport her back in her previous state. No one mentions that they’ve come up with a cure to all cancer, but perhaps that’s because by the 24th century, cancer has already been cured in a different way. But they’ve also cured aging – just use an old transporter scan and you’ll keep being loaded as your 25 year old self.

How is Lt. Broccoli – sorry, Barclay – able to see and grab creatures in the energy stream during transport? If every molecule in your body is being turned into energy…how is sight or movement possible?

Why doesn’t anyone on the Enterprise seem to have any sense of urgency? I swear it took a couple of seasons to see anyone break into a light jog, let alone a run. I don’t know how many scenes I’ve watched where Worf and his security team casually walk to part of a ship to apprehend a dangerous alien/crew member/what have you. You think they’d be liberally using the transporter. You think you’re going to get away? BAM, Worf just teleported right in front of you! Or better yet, we teleported you to a holding cell.

When Geordi and Ensign Ro are believed to be dead but they’re actually on the Enterprise out of phase, at the end of the episode Geordi is ravenous because they haven’t eaten in two days. So we know even though they’re out of phase, they’re still having normal bodily functions. …So where did they poop during these two days? I know it’s not the most important question in the Star Trek universe, but knowing there’s phased poop hidden on the Enterprise fills me with endless mirth.

But the most baffling thing of all…why the hell does Synthehol exist? Why would you keep the awful taste of alcohol and get rid of the main point of drinking it, the intoxicating effects? If there’s anything in Star Trek that makes it hard for me to suspend disbelief, it’s this.

22 comments

I’m psyched to hear you’ve been watching TNG! It’s my favorite Star Trek series by far, and I totally agree about how progressive the show was for its time (with a few episodes as notable exceptions).

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think TNG probably sowed some seeds of doubt that helped me become an atheist later in life with episodes like “Who Watches the Watchers” and “Devil’s Due”.

I agree about synthehol being confusing. I seem to remember an episode where someone says that it does get you drunk like alcohol, but that you can take an antidote whenever you like that immediately eliminates the inebriation (I think it might have been the episode that Scotty was in?). Other times though, people seem to treat it like it doesn’t have any effect at all.

Anyway, it’s cool to hear from a real scientist that some of the bio stuff was plausible!

Synthehol is supposed to have the effects, until you don’t want the effects. Or something like that.

Starfleet medical facilities have sterile fields. Which reminds me, for some reason, of the Heisenberg compensator, which makes transporters tick, dontcha know. Michael Okuda, who was an art supervisor for ST:TNG, was asked how these devices works. His answer: “They work just fine, thank you.”

The overall attitude towards women in TOS was not always the greatest. For instance, no women of command rank in Starfleet. To wit, the last aired episode, “Turnabout Intruder”, which is one of the worst episodes of any of the ST series (IMO). All about a woman who wanted to be a starship captain, but couldn’t because she wasn’t a dude, and who went nuts as a result, going so far as to “steal” Jim Kirk’s body so she could be captain of the Enterprise. Kirk’s parting observation in said episode is horrific. Really horrific.

THISBE is so right about “Who Watches The Watchers.” One of the best episodes ever, for my money.

Star Trek always strove for optimism, it seemed to me. The idea that humanity could (eventually) learn from its myriad missteps and fuck-ups, and do great things, is a nice one to contemplate. Well, Star Trek: PLF did, at any rate. (PLF = Pre Lens Flare) Star Trek Into Lens Flare seems more interested in product placement, fight sequences and, well, lens flare, than PLF.

veritasknight says:

May 27, 2014

Sean – remember The Cage. Roddenbury wanted a woman to be the first officer and that was one of the things that got kaiboshed by the studio, because nobody would believe a WOMAN OFFICER! LOL! At the same time we must criticise TOS for its values towards women, we should also remember that the series had a great woman writer, DC Fontana, who penned classic scripts and was pushed in the industry despite her gender, even though she had to sign her name to appear more masculine. It was a start in a period where starts were rare, if ever, existing.

The thing about the transporters giving eternal youth is sort of, I think, answered in that episode (sorry, I forget what season or number, so maybe spoilers) where Captain Picard, Lieutenant Ro, and Guinan get turned into 12 year olds. Its a purely psychological thing. When contemplating being stuck and having to live their lives over again, Picard throws a predictably juvenile snit about not wanting to end up Wesley Crusher’s room-mate at the academy. Silly humans get attached to their perceived stations in life and don’t want to let it go.

John Small Berries says:

May 27, 2014

The thing that bugged me was that they established in the very first episode that the computer keeps track of the location of everyone on board, yet nobody in Starfleet thought it might be useful to have the computer notify the security station when someone inexplicably vanished from the ship (or suddenly appeared on it).

Especially given how ridiculously often that happened.

Jen says:

May 27, 2014

John Small Berries: Yes, this is one of my pet peeves I forgot about! You think they’d have a program where if someone vanished, the computer would let them know. Vanishing means they either died or something fishier is going on, either of which demands and immediate response.

Another thing that always chafed me (moreso in TOS) but why is there no decontamination/quarantine with the transporter? At least in TOS some weird stuff getting to the ship via someone being transported is the linchpin of a few episodes (I’m still on season 1 of TNG myself, so maybe this is addressed/answered later in that series), so obviously it IS necessary; scrambling people’s atoms all across space isn’t getting rid of whatever space herpes they’ve picked up.

And why do the rooms to people’s quarters never seem to lock? Anyone can just walk into anyone’s room at any time. Or is this such a future utopia that no one would even think about doing that?

Check out the original series. (I was born before the first episode, but discovered it only in reruns in the 1970s.) While Picard is a better captain than Kirk, or at least Stewart a better actor than Shatner, in some respects I like TOS better. You do have to see it in the context of its time, as some things might look cheesy today (like to you even some things in TNG look cheesy). But, at the height of the Cold War, a Russian on the bridge! A Black woman on the bridge when there were still Jim Crow laws. 1/3 of the crew female. (Roddenberry wanted 50/50, but the network objected on the grounds that the viewers would think about “all the fooling around going on up there”. It is also of its time that they didn’t consider homosexuality and group sex as alternatives.)

I think some of TNG tries to copy too much from TOS. Riker’s “shoot first and ask questions later” harks back to Kirk. Data’s logic is a weak version of Spock. And so on.

Okay, let’s ignore the fact that nearly every intelligent species they interacted with was an essentially perfect humanoid scale and form, since this just adds weight to my next point: I never got over the fact that they didn’t have seatbelts! How many times did they get violently tossed out of their seats for lack of a $10 mid-20th century safety kludge? How many phasers were fired defensively just that many seconds later, delayed they picked themselves up off the floor? How many outcomes did that change, or worsen? Of course, most crewmembers were left standing around with no safety positioning gear for no apparent reason — apparently the Federation starship position assignment process was the ultimate interstellar game of musical chairs.

You might want to look into the Mission Log Podcast. Two Trek fans, chosen and backed by Rod Roddenberry, re-watch every episode in order, then discuss it looking for the “messages, morals, and meanings” – with a little time reserved for some of those science and plot fails. They’ve just finished the original and animated series, getting ready to start the movies, and then will start working through TNG (a couple months from now, I’m guessing) – which might be a good time for you to jump on.

Don’t think about the science too much, it’ll hurt your head. Sometimes they have moments of clarity but it’s usually garbage. Klingons, humans and vulcans can all interbreed because they are actually the same species seeded by ancient aliens. Universal translators can understand aliens they have never encountered before from the first word they speak and even make it look like the crew is speaking the local language. And if I were knocked out of phase I would be less worried about pooping than the fact that I was out of phase with all of the air on the ship. Or the floor. Or the outer hull.

The artificial gravity on the ship has annoyed me for years. If you walk onto the roof of a house, gravity doesn’t suddenly stop. Do they have to have some sort of anti-gravity technology on the outside to counteract the artificial gravity on the inside so asteroids aren’t always crashing into the hull?

FakeEmailAddress says:

Jun 9, 2014

@TABBY LAVALAMP: Probably. Q and that teenaged girl were able to stand on the outside of the Enterprise as if there were “normal” gravity there, but they’re Q and able to do whatever they want. When Worf et al went outside in First Contact, they were apparently operating in zero-gravity with special boots to stick to the hull.

The thing that bothered me most about Star Trek gravity was again in the episode with LaForge and Ro being out of phase. They were clearly operating under normal gravity, so whatever they were made of at the time obviously interacted with gravity (even artificial gravity) normally. They were able to walk through walls, but did not fall through the floor. There’s no possible way to structure a gravitational field such that everything is attracted to the floor as if under normal gravity, but where something that didn’t interact electromagnetically with the floor wouldn’t sink through it. The possibility of there being some sort of magical gravitational barrier in the floor seems unlikely, since if they had such technology, why wouldn’t they use it in the hull as well, where it would have stopped the romulan captain from getting spaced?

TOS may have had some problems, but for its day it was pretty forward looking. It had the first interracial kiss on prime time television. Surely, you’ve read the account of how Martin Luther King himself dissuaded Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura) from leaving the show, and how Gene Roddenberry reacted when she explained why she wanted to withdraw her resignation: “Thank God someone understands what I am trying to achieve.” (http://planetwaves.net/news/daily-astrology/martin-luther-king-mlk-uhura-nichelle-nichols/)

We recently re-watched the whole series. Needless to say it was mixed bag. I believe one selling point was that that the series could recycle sets the studio to save money, so they did a Western, a Twilight Zone episode and so on. I think a bouquet of roses was the villain in one episode. Still, it was nine miles better than anything else, except perhaps Forbidden Planet, but that was just a single movie.

TNG took it a a fair bit farther. The original head of security was a woman. They ditched the miniskirts. Picard may have had a fling or two, but he didn’t have a girl in every port. Sometimes it just got a bit too touchy feely, but it was a true creation of the 1970s, even if it came out a fair bit later. Attitudes took a turn for the worse as the 80s progressed, and this wasn’t the first time. Compare the roles of women in movies from the 1930s and the 1950s, and remember that Hollywood had a lot more female screenwriters way back when.

When I was little, I watched this show without fail, and slowly became disillusioned as they invented immortality twice… then five times… finally, I think my total was 12. They invented immortality twelve separate times, and at no point did anyone say: “Holy latinum, Batman! We’d better write this up for Starfleet Medical. We’ll be famous!”

I mean, seriously: at one point, they accidentally brought back Picard’s freakin’ hair! He had a full head of the stuff, not to mention a teenage body, and the first thing he thinks of is how they can make him old again?

I think they finally figured out that you can put a bomb on on the transporter pad in one of the sequel shows, which is pretty much: “EX-TER-MIN-ATE! EX-TER-MIN-ATE! … LEV-I-TATE!”